Do you love fashion, design, and selling things? Do you love horses? You might be a perfect candidate for a career as an equestrian graphic designer and business owner, like Mary Campbell of Mare Modern Goods.
Mary rode as a child, then got back into horses after taking a 20-year break. She started her business when she received some dog-related gifts and realized there wasn’t a similar product or business in the equestrian world. She saw a need in the market, and then used her love of color and art skills to launch her company seven years ago.
Favorite Parts of Her Career
Mary now creates equine-related graphics and then puts them on products, which she sells on her ecommerce website, maregoods.com, as well as wholesale (selling to retail stores for them to sell to customers). Some of her products include graphic T-shirts, socks, mugs, cards, and other giftware. All of her designs are colorful, upbeat, and specific to horses.
Her favorite parts of being an entrepreneur are combining her equestrian passion with her design and art skills, along with building a successful small business. She also handles her own website design and updates, business management, marketing, sales and more, which keeps it interesting and keeps her busy.
Mary also enjoys doing booths at shows like Equine Affaire and the Defender Kentucky Three-Day Event, where she sells directly to her customers and gets to visit with other horse enthusiasts and see what trends are out there in the horse show world.
College
Mary says college was important in her design journey. While she always enjoyed art and had natural talent, she got a master’s degree in graphic art, and took classes in art direction and illustration as well. Her education helped elevate her skills, taking a general artistic talent and fine-tuning it.
For inspiration, Mary suggests that it’s a great idea to look at outside brands and companies that aren’t related to the horse world to see what trends are out there and then use those to tweak your designs and products. Also, gaining experience in web design, marketing, business, and sales helps her business skills. She says she hires outside help for some things, like accounting, and knowing what areas you need to outsource is an important learning area for business owners like herself.
Being Different
Mary’s best advice is, “Don’t be afraid to be weird!” She has found it beneficial to do things differently than everyone else. If you have an idea or a style that is “out there,” you have to run with it, because that’s what makes you and your product unique. Being different is what will stand out, but a viable business is more than just an idea—it’s a lot of hard work.
“Sometimes it’s better to not know everything up front, because it will be overwhelming,” she says. “But you have to go into a business believing it will work out.”
Along with a lot of hard work, Mary shares that it takes a lot of commitment to build a business, but that it is worth it in the end.
“It’s not like ‘Shark Tank’ [the TV show where entrepreneurs pitch ideas to get investor funding],” she says, but you have to be gritty and chip away at it over time—“just like training a horse!”
Mary advises that you have to show up and be consistent in building your brand a little bit, every day, for years.
Lowering Risk
To take some of the risk out of starting her own business, she started her Mare Modern Goods company alongside her freelance graphic design business working with outside clients. This allowed her to take some of the scary financial risk out of it, and she also started with a few items and then built her product line over time, so she didn’t have so much financial investment all at once.
As the company grew more successful and increased sales, Mary would then invest more money back into additional products and designs. This strategy proved smart, as she was able to stay the course and continually grow her business.
Tailoring a Career
As we see with Mary and Mare Modern Goods, almost every type of business or skill area can be tweaked or combined to specifically relate to horses.
Graphic/product design and small business ownership is just one example of a talent or skill that is valuable in the mainstream world, which can then be combined with your equestrian passion to form a whole new career path!
This article about Mary Campbell’s career as a business owner and graphic designer appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Young Rider magazine. Click here to subscribe!
